Collapsing Old Memories

I stared across the room at Blixa Bargeld, and the sun streamed through the window, and it struck his face just so. Something clicked, and I remembered.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Memory is a funny thing. It's an empiricism of the mind. Our personal histories might coincide when it comes to nailing down a date, but as far as interpreting what happened on that date . . . well.

In 1981, I was sleepwalking in Seattle. I had been on the musical fringes since I bought my first New York Dolls album at 13. I had seen the Sex Pistols implode in San Francisco at 17. I had watched my heroes die in obscurity while the likes of Styx and the Eagles grew fat and glutted the airwaves.

My town's alternative music scene was fragmented: Handfuls of urban punks clustered around scattered clubs (anyone remember the Bird? the Showbox?); stranded in the suburbs, budding goths formed small alliances. Art-rock ensembles held court in warehouses, galleries and self-styled performances spaces. They played mostly for one another.

The whole scene was a depressing aftermath to the giddy musical explosions of the mid-'70s, and it made me tired. So tired that I decided to abandon music altogether and devote my life to watching old Woody Woodpecker cartoons and eating corn dogs dipped in mustard. Misery loves junk.

I had gone through a freezer's worth of corn dogs when a friend called to tell me that a German band called Einsturzende Neubauten (translation: "collapsing new buildings") was playing a Saturday evening concert on the waterfront. I belched noncommittally.

"What's to see?" I asked as Woody cackled on the TV. "I've seen it all. The Dolls. The Pistols. The Ramones. I'm 21. I'm old and tired. Leave me in peace."

"You haven't seen anything yet," said my friend.

She was right. I went to the performance in Myrtle Edwards Park that Saturday, and it changed my life -- or at least convinced me to give up corn dogs and start listening to music again. For this post-teen recluse, Neubauten supplied more than an extremely loud, proto-industrial concert. It offered a generational time signature. At a time of tiny shows in little venues, its performance sparked a huge gathering of countercultural misfits: kids with black lipstick and big hair who read Edgar Allen Poe during their school lunch breaks; artists whose aesthetic drew equally from Dadaism and Derrida; musicians itching to break free from three-chord guitar riffs.

And oh, the numbers. There were thousands of us. An ocean of new faces, all gawking at one another with amazement and the same mute question: Now where the hell did you come from?

Neubauten, a group dedicated to disrupting musical convention, effectively dissolved the boundaries between our isolated outsiderliness. We discovered a collective identity based on shared alienation. We recognized ourselves as a real generation, albeit one without a title.

The day lodges in my memory as a series of mental images: The way the reds and golds of the setting sun matched the flames spiraling up from the stage, where various heaps of equipment had been set afire. The way Neubauten singer Bargeld stood in the glow like a Druid priest for a poststructuralist era, stripped to the waist and sweating black soot, his majestically tangled hair silhouetted against the grain elevators of the industrial shoreline.

I remember the sound: A cacophony of grinding machinery, feedback and the amplified clatter of shopping carts and garbage bins being battered into sheet metal. The roar was so huge it carried across Puget Sound and bounced off of the surrounding hills. To me, it was the sound of the old being ground into the new.

Afterward, the Seattle Police Department grappled with noise complaints while I went home and began pounding out a beat on my VCR. I turned up Woody Woodpecker to distortion level. I hauled out my guitar, cranked up the volume and played anything that came into my head as long as it didn't involve chord progressions.

That was a long time ago. More recently -- say, last year -- I interviewed Herr Bargeld for a newspaper article. Sitting in his hotel room sipping white wine, he was as majestic as I remembered, though his sartorial tastes had moved to dapper hats and three-piece suits.

I stared across the room at Blixa Bargeld, and the sun streamed through the window, and it struck his face just so. Something clicked, and I remembered.

"You know," I began, suddenly eager to share my decades-old epiphany, "I saw Neubauten play a show on the Seattle waterfront in the '80s . . ."

Bargeld rolled his enormous eyes. "Yes, yes," he said. "And there were grain elevators and fire and the sun was setting behind me. I have heard this before. That was a terrible show. Terrible. The equipment did not work. The sound did not work. And yet every person from Seattle I meet thinks this concert changed their life. It's highly hilarious. What was the question?"

I fidgeted. Then, "Where do you have your suits made?"

Memory is a funny thing. One person's empiricism can be another's epiphany. Or something like that. ..